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Art in The Information Age Technology and Conceptual Art 2002 PDF
Art in The Information Age Technology and Conceptual Art 2002 PDF
I
and-technology. This essay
reexamines the interrelationship
of these tendencies as they
developed in the 1960s, focus-
n the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan prophesied protocols of computer software and ing on the art criticism of Jack
that electronic media were creating an increasingly intercon- the increasingly “dematerialized” Burnham and the artists in-
cluded in the Software exhibition
nected global village. Such pronouncements popularized the forms of experimental art, which that he curated. The historiciza-
idea that the era of machine-age technology was drawing to a the critic interpreted, metaphori- tion of these practices as
close, ushering in a new era of information technology. Sens- cally, as functioning like informa- distinct artistic categories is
ing this shift, Pontus Hultén organized a simultaneously nos- tion processing systems. Software examined. By interpreting
conceptual art and art-and-
talgic and futuristic exhibition on art and mechanical included works by conceptual artists
technology as re¯ections and
technology at the Museum of Modern Art in New York such as Les Levine, Hans Haacke constituents of broad cultural
(MOMA) in 1968. The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Me- and Joseph Kosuth, whose art was transformations during the
chanical Age included work ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s presented beside displays of tech- information age, the author
16th-century drawings of ying machines to contemporary nology including the rst public ex- concludes that the two tenden-
cies share important similarities,
artist-engineer collaborations selected through a competition hibition of hypertext (Labyrinth, an and that this common ground
organized by Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (E.A.T.). electronic exhibition catalog de- offers useful insights into
E.A.T. had emerged out of the enthusiasm generated by nine signed by Ned Woodman and Ted late± 20th-century art.
evenings: theatre and engineering, a festival of technologically en- Nelson) and a model of intelligent
hanced performances that artist Robert Rauschenberg and architecture (SEEK, a recon g-
engineer Billy Klüver organized in New York in October 1966. urable environment for gerbils designed by Nicholas Negro-
E.A.T. also lent its expertise to engineering a multimedia ex- ponte and the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts
travaganza designed for the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka World’s Institute of Technology) [1].
Fair in 1970. Simultaneously, the American Pavilion at Osaka Regardless of these points of intersection and the fact that
included an exhibition of collaborative projects between artists conceptual art emerged during a moment of intensive artis-
and industry that were produced under the aegis of the Art tic experimentation with technology, few scholars have ex-
and Technology (A&T) Program at the Los Angeles County plored the relationship between technology and conceptual
Museum of Art. art. Indeed, art-historical literature traditionally has drawn
Ambitious as they were, few of the celebrated artist-engineer rigid categorical distinctions between conceptual art and art-
collaborations of this period focused on the artistic use of in- and-technology. The following reexamination, however, chal-
formation technologies, such as computers and telecommu- lenges the disciplinary boundaries that obscure signi cant
nications. Taking an important step in that direction, Cybernetic parallels between these practices. The rst part describes Burn-
Serendipity, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in ham’s curatorial premises for the Software exhibition and in-
1968, was thematically centered on the relationship between terprets works in the show by Levine, Haacke and Kosuth. The
computers and creativity. This show, however, remained fo- second part proposes several possible reasons why conceptual
cused on the materiality of technological apparatuses and their art and art-and-technology became xed as distinct, if not anti-
products, such as robotic devices and computer graphics. thetical, categories. The conclusion suggests that the corre-
Art critic Jack Burnham pushed the exploration of the rela- spondences shared by these two artistic tendencies offer
tionship between art and information technology to an un- grounds for rethinking the relationship between them as con-
precedented point. In 1970, he curated the exhibition Software, stituents of larger social transformations from the machine
Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, at the Jewish Mu- age of industrial society to the so-called information age of
seum in New York. This show was the rst major U.S. art-and- post-industrial society.
technology exhibition that attempted to utilize computers in Before proceeding, some working de nitions will clarify the
a museum context. Software’s technological ambitions were terminology of conceptual art and art-and-technology in order
matched by Burnham’s conceptually sophisticated vision, for to open up a discussion of their relatedness beyond the nar-
the show drew parallels between the ephemeral programs and row con nes of extant discourses. Resisting the arch formal-
ism that had become institutionalized by the 1960s, conceptual
art has sought to analyze the ideas underlying the creation and
Edward A. Shanken (art historian), Information Science 1 Studies (ISIS), 17 John Hope
Franklin Center, Box 90400, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, U.S.A. E-mail:
reception of art, rather than to elaborate another stylistic con-
<edward.shanken@duke.edu>. vention in the historical succession of modernist avant-garde
Based on a paper originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles, California, 12–17 movements. Investigations by conceptual artists into networks
August 2001. The paper was presented in the art gallery theater as part of the Art and
Culture Papers component of N-Space, the SIGGRAPH 2001 Art Gallery. An earlier, shorter
of signication and structures of knowledge (which enable art
version of this essay was published in SIGGRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog to have meaning) have frequently employed text as a strate-
(New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001) pp. 8–15. Reprinted courtesy ACM SIGGRAPH.
gic device to examine the interstice between visual and verbal
© 2002 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 433–438, 2002 433
S A
I N
G D languages as semiotic systems. In this re- Esthetics” (1968) and “Real Time simulations and representations—i.e.
G gard, conceptual art is a meta-critical and Systems” (1969) [4], Burnham designed software—as opposed to rst-hand, di-
R C
A U self-re exive art process. It is engaged in Software to function as a testing ground rect, corporeal experiences of actual ob-
P L
H T theorizing the possibilities of signi ca- for public interaction with “information jects, places and events, i.e. hardware.
U tion in art’s multiple contexts (including systems and their devices.” Many of the
A R All activities which have no connection
R E its history and criticism, exhibitions and displays were indeed interactive and with object or material mass are the re-
T
markets). In interrogating the relation- based on two-way communication be- sult of software. Images themselves are
ship between ideas and art, conceptual tween the viewer and the exhibit. Software hardware. Information about these im-
art de-emphasizes the value traditionally was predicated, moreover, on the ideas of ages is software. . . . The experience of
seeing something rst hand is no longer
accorded to the materiality of art objects. “software” and “information technology” of value in a software controlled society,
It focuses, rather, on examining the pre- as metaphors for art. Burnham conceived as anything seen through the media car-
conditions for how meaning emerges in of “software” as parallel to the aesthetic ries just as much energy as rst hand ex-
art, seen as a semiotic system. principles, concepts or programs that un- perience. . . . In the same way, most of the
art that is produced today ends up as in-
Art-and-technology has focused its in- derlie the formal embodiment of actual
formation about art [8].
quiry on the materials and/or concepts art objects, which in turn parallel “hard-
of technology and science, which it rec- ware.” In this regard, he interpreted con- Levine conceived of the 31,000 indi-
ognizes artists have historically incorpo- temporary experimental art practices, vidual photos as the residual effects or
rated in their work. Its investigations including conceptual art, as predomi- “burn-off” of the information system he
include: (1) the aesthetic examination of nantly concerned with the software aspect created—as the material manifestation
the visual forms of science and technol- of aesthetic production. of software. In other words, Systems Burn-
ogy, (2) the application of science and In his 1970 essay “Alice’s Head,” Burn- Off was an artwork that produced infor-
technology in order to create visual forms ham suggested that, like the “grin with- mation (software) about the information
and (3) the use of scientic concepts and out the cat” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in produced and disseminated by the media
technological media both to question Wonderland, conceptual art was all but de- (software) about art (hardware). It of-
their prescribed applications and to cre- void of the conventional materiality as- fered a critique of the systematic process
ate new aesthetic models. In this third sociated with art objects. He subsequently through which art objects (hardware) be-
case, art-and-technology, like conceptual explained Software in similar terms, as “an come transformed by the media into in-
art, is also a meta-critical process. It chal- attempt to produce aesthetic sensations formation about art objects (software).
lenges the systems of knowledge (and the without the intervening ‘object’” [5]. Whereas Levine stated that most art
technologically mediated modes of Burnham theorized this artistic shift as “ends up as information about art,” Sys-
knowing) that structure scientic meth- paralleling larger social transformations tems Burn-Off was art as information about
ods and conventional aesthetic values. based in cybernetics and systems theory. information about art, adding a level of
Further, it examines the social and aes- Here, the interactive feedback of infor- complexity and re exivity onto that cycle
thetic implications of technological mation amongst systems and their com- of transformations in media culture.
media that de ne, package and distrib- ponents in global elds eradicated any Systems Burn-Off can be related to
ute information. “separation between the mind of the per- Levine’s interactive video installations,
ceiver and the environment” [6]. such as Iris (1968) and Contact: A Cyber-
In the late 1960s, Les Levine was at the netic Sculpture (1969). In these works,
ART AS SOFTWARE: BURNHAM, forefront of artistic experimentation video cameras captured various images
LEVINE, HAACKE, KOSUTH using the interactive feedback of infor- of the viewer(s), which were fed back,
The title for the Software exhibition was mation systems to interrogate the bound- often with time delays or other distor-
suggested to Burnham by artist Les aries between viewer and environment. tions, onto a bank of monitors. As Levine
Levine. Burnham himself had interacted He was represented in Software by three noted, “‘Iris’ . . . turns the viewer into in-
directly with software as a fellow at the pieces, including Systems Burn-Off X Resid- formation . . . ‘Contact’ is a system that
Center for Advanced Visual Studies ual Software (1969). The original instal- synthesizes man with his technology . . .
(CAVS) at MIT during the 1968–1969 ac- lation at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in the people are the software” [9]. Al-
ademic year. He reported on that expe- Chicago comprised 1,000 copies of 31 though these works demanded the di-
rience in a public lecture organized by photographs taken by Levine at the rect, corporeal experience of the
curator Edward Fry at the Guggenheim March 1969 opening of the highly pub- participant, it was the experience of see-
Museum in 1969, later published as “The licized Earth Works exhibition in Ithaca, ing oneself as information—as trans-
Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems.” Burn- New York. Numerous New York critics formed into software—that was of
ham expressed his interest in how “a di- and journalists had been bused upstate primary concern to the artist. In this re-
alogue evolves between the participants— for the event. Levine explained that most gard, Levine provocatively has noted
the computer program and the human of the 31,000 photographs, which docu- that, “Simulation is more real than real-
subject—so that both move beyond their mented the media spectacle, were “ran- ity. Reality is an over-rated hierarchy”
original state” [2]. He further theorized domly distributed on the oor and [10]. For many artists working at the in-
this bi-directional exchange as a model for covered with jello; some were stuck to the tersection of conceptual art and art-
the “eventual two-way communication” wall with chewing gum; the rest were for and-technology, the particular visual
that he anticipated emerging in art [3]. sale” [7]. manifestation of the artwork as an object
Karl Katz, director of the Jewish Museum, Levine’s artist’s statement in the Soft- was secondary to the expression of an idea
heard the talk and invited Burnham to ware exhibition catalog also outlined his that becomes reality by simulating it.
curate an exhibition. concept of software and its relationship Conceptual artist Hans Haacke also
Following up the ideas he outlined in to art. He argued that the proliferation utilized technology and mass media in
“The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems” of mass media was changing knowledge the production of art. Perhaps best
and in related essays, including “Systems into a second-hand mental experience of known for his politically charged cri-